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A Fertility Diary’s Happy Ending: Was It All Worth It?

They say a mother should be primally attuned to her child’s cries. That would come a few days later for me, because I don’t remember our child’s first cry at all.

I was pretty out of it when they told me were going to have to do a Caesarean section. I had been induced, and then in labor for a half-day. No one wanted to take any chances with me, not after all I’d been through: the three years of infertility, four miscarriages and 10 doctors (not including my current obstetrician).

So we tried labor, but apparently the baby wasn’t handling contractions well. (To be honest, neither was I, not till the epidural an hour before). With every contraction, the baby’s heartbeat was dropping, so they finally decided to get it out – calmly, not an emergency C-section. I nodded groggily, doped up from the IV in my back plus the Benadryl they had given me to combat the resulting unbearable itchiness.

Forty minutes later I lay on the gurney, my hair in a net, a blue curtain blocking my body from the chest down. I heard my doctor’s soft voice as she spoke to the half-dozen people milling about the room, smiled as my husband, Solomon, made jokes in my ear and I struggled to stay awake. “This is it!” he said again for the 50th time that week. He had been driving me crazy with that statement, but I thought that by now it must have been true. I felt a mild tugging on my jelly belly (when did the skin come so loose?) before they lowered the curtain to show me a squirming bloody alien.

“This is your daughter!” Dr. Vernon said. I was still leaking tears by the time they handed her to us: less bloody, but still a tiny extraterrestrial (6 pounds 10 ounces, despite her last in-utero measurement of 8 pounds). Supine, I couldn’t see her and she could hardly see me, but her soft smooth skin stopped trembling as she lay on my chest, her father’s warm hand covering her and securing her to me.

“Do you have a name?” the doctor asked. I nodded but was too choked up to speak, so Solomon said it: Lily Charlotte. Lily for the biblical feminist Lilith, and Charlotte after my maternal Grandpa Charlie, who had always told me I was born with my hand out asking for things, trying to get what I needed. Thank goodness for that quality, because otherwise I’d never have made it this far, after so much pain and suffering, to have our daughter.

Our daughter. Three days into our hospital stay, I still could not believe this perfect creature was ours. That she came out of my body.

“I’m afraid her Bilirubin is high,” the resident pediatrician said. Such innocuous words (didn’t I date a Billy Rubin in college?) for high bile levels, which can be dangerous to a baby’s brain at worst, but most commonly manifests in jaundice. Stuck in the hospital, I hadn’t noticed that Lily’s skin was yellowish. We had assumed she had her father’s Mediterranean olive skin tone. They wanted me to supplement nursing with formula, and the next day they told me she had to go under the sunlamp.

“Only four days old and going for the tanning bed?” I tried to joke. But it wasn’t funny when they took her away from us. I heard her howling, and slowly followed. By the time I got to her, her eyes were covered in tape, and she was flailing inside the tiny incubator, its blue light buzzing.

I burst into tears.

A nurse came running over. “A lot of babies have jaundice,” she said. “She’ll be fine.” I nodded. I’d just seen babies who looked worse (one with a smushed eye from natural labor, others wired to machine after machine) and intellectually understood Lily was fine. But I couldn’t watch her scrawny body heaving helplessly. I remembered the time Solomon and I were dating and we went to Dining in the Dark, a blindfolded dinner meant to heighten our other senses and give us appreciation for the sightless. But I had felt awful: claustrophobic, off-balance, near-manic. Did Lily feel that way now? Her cries were tugging at something deep inside of me.

“She’s going to be O.K.,” Solomon said. He reached his hands into the holes of the incubator and placed them on our daughter.

“Why don’t you go back to the room?” he said. “You’re exhausted.” It was true: I was still doped up on painkillers, sore from the surgery, tired from trying to get my milk production started (I was still only producing colostrum, the pre-breast milk that comes in before milk), and so very worried about Lily.

“Yeah, why don’t you go back to your room and rest, Mom,” the nurse said.

Mom. She was talking to me. I was the mother. After so many years of trying to get pregnant, stay pregnant and have a baby, I was finally being allowed into the exclusive club. And I had to take everything that came with it: watching my child’s pain, feeling it and having no control to make it better.

We would be released from the hospital on Lily’s fifth day, her skin rosy, her bile levels normal. A week later she’d have regained all her weight, I’d have weaned her off formula, and her dad would have spent many a night cradling her with his warm hands.

“Was it worth it?” friends asked me. “Would you do it all again?” I couldn’t stop looking at Lily: while I was nursing, while she was sleeping, even while I was briefly outside, viewing her on my phone via the high-tech monitor broadcasting her in real time. She was a screamer, a joker – hiding my breast with her arm so I couldn’t tell she was just sleeping, not really nursing – a sly, one-mouthed-corner smiler, and so many things yet to come.

“Yes,” I tell them, desperately hoping these happy days would soon erase the tortuous path it took to get her. “She’s definitely worth it.”

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more